Charlie Jane Anders

Watching television with your friends can be a lovely
bonding experience — unless someone acts like a jerk, and ruins it for
everyone. Here's our helpful rundown of the worst types of obnoxious behavior
to avoid when watching TV with your crew.

This essay will be structured in two parts:

1) A list of the types of disruptive behaviors that destroy
everyone else's enjoyment of a TV show, at which point you might as well be
watching the slowly burning logs on the Fireplace Channel.

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2) A most sober and understated explanation of why, exactly,
you are ruining everything for everybody in the entire universe, and deserve to
be locked inside a Hooters where they're endlessly watching Married With Children reruns on the
giant screen, for the rest of your natural life.

The most annoying things you do during communal
TV-watching:

Not paying attention,
and then complaining that something doesn't make sense

Fair enough. You have to retire to the kitchen to make
yourself a banana-oreo-nutella smoothie on the loudest possible setting, and
you don't want us to pause the show until you get back. Or maybe you have some
emails that you absolutely must peruse, and you can't wait until the episode's
denouement. Just because you're in the room with other people who are watching
a show, does not mean that you have to watch it too.

But don't then turn around and start looking for plot holes
in a show that you haven't been paying attention to. You should accept there's
at least a possibility that some of your objections to the episode's plot were
addressed during the 15 or 20 minutes when you were playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf and attempting
to convince Broccolo to do something indecent in the bushes.

In general, nitpicks and objections to the plausibility of a
piece of television should be saved for the end of the episode — or if they
can't wait, at least hit "pause" before explaining that electric
trains don't work that way. Also, accept that some people might hold a show
about witches opening a coffee shop to a lower standard of strict realism.

Live-tweeting the
episode OUT LOUD. Feel free to live-tweet silently.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from the person who completely
disengages from a piece of television, except to drop in and offer nitpicks,
there's the person who engages too much. We know that as you watch the show,
you're imagining how you're going to render it into GIFs and snarky memes
afterwards — but that process doesn't have to begin while we're actually still
watching the show.

If you spot a moment that is destined to become an epic
animated GIF, there's no need to start acting out said GIF while the show is
still airing. And if you're writing barbed tweets about the show during its
runtime, maybe share them during the commercial break? The meta-show that
you're creating in your head and on your handheld device shouldn't ever
entirely replace or overwhelm the actual TV show that we're actually, you know,
watching.

This also goes for "shipping" two characters to
the point where, if either of them even interacts with a third party, you start
making outraged noises or throwing bits of oreo-nutella smoothie at the screen.

Expressing nausea,
with words or gestures, when anybody on screen expresses an emotion.

We all hate melodrama, and canned emotion, and faux
sentiment — but you have to give a TV show a chance to try and expand its
characters' emotional palette. If, the moment a character starts shedding
tears, getting upset or even expressing fondness towards another human, you
start shoving two fingers down your throat or announcing your intention to blow
chunks, you may well succeed in ruining the mood to the point where the emotion
on screen feels false simply by virtue of being in the same room as your
display.

Yes, most of the time when people emote on television, it's
a bit overwrought and cheap seats-y (looking at you, most CW shows) — but the
alternative is often television where everybody is a stoic, can-do forensic
scientist whose emotions alternate between "chipper" and
"grim."

And the larger point is, some of us actually want to give
the emotional moments a chance to work. They may not, in the end, but we want
to give them their shot. Sometimes actors surprise us and actually do sweep us
up in their raw emotion. But not if you rush to judgment, and condemn what
you're seeing as pure melodramatic dross.

Various and sundry
attempts to MST3K a TV show that some people are actually watching

There are two issues here: 1) You are probably not as funny
as you think you are. 2) We can't hear what the characters are actually saying
over your attempt to supply your own dialogue for them, neo-Benshi style.

Fair enough if it's a TV show that everybody in the room
loathes, or some terrible movie that you've all decided to watch and mock
together. But if even one person in the room kind of likes the show, and wants
to emerge from this with the experience of having seen the actual show, without
commentary track, then you are ruining everything. Especially if your attempts
at mocking the show are on the level of "this is so dumb," just go
back to Animal Crossing. Broccolo misses you.

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Coming in for episode
27 of a show and expecting to be up to speed

If your friends are nice, they'll have given you the crash
course before the show starts — but there's a limit to how much someone can
explain a show to you after you've already a season and a half worth of crazy
reveals. There's a special pleasure to diving into a TV show in the middle and
being confused and at sea, it's like extreme in-medias-res, or some kind of postmodern decontextualized
narrative.

But after your friends have given you the cliffs-notes and
the episode has started, just run with it. Don't expect everything to make
sense right away — and don't assume your friends know the answers to
everything. Often if something is mysterious in a show, it's mysterious on
purpose, and your friends don't know exactly what's going on in this episode
yet, either. Save the questions for the commercial breaks, or at least ration
them.

Why you are destroying not just this entertainment experience,
but all entertainment everywhere:

TV is a medium that, traditionally, assumes a short
attention span and limited powers of concentration on the part of its audience.
Until fairly recently, every episode of a particular TV show had to start off
with the same status quo as every other episode of that show. Plot points often
have to be explained five or six times, just in case anybody was taking a whiz
the first four times something was brought up. Characters' motivations have to
be transparent. Etc.

When you watch television with limited attention — and do
so in a way that prevents everybody else in the room from paying attention,
either, you are turning the dumbness of television into a self-fulfilling
prophecy. You are probably starting with the assumption that what you're
watching is going to be so dumb that nobody needs to pay attention, but then your
behavior is making any other assumption impossible to validate. You are turning
television into the thing that you implicitly accuse it of being.

And just suppose for a moment that someone has been clever
enough to make a TV episode that can be watched on multiple levels — the most
superficial level of "background noise," as well as levels that
require someone to have heard every line of dialogue, and maybe even paid
attention to scene-setting and people's facial tics and little grace notes here
and there. And suppose that the people making this miracle of television
eventually realize, thanks to the echo chamber
of the internet, that absolutely nobody is picking up on anything but the
"background noise" version of their show. Why should they bother to do
anything more than that?

If you want television to be better, you have to give it a
chance to be better.

We hear a lot about the evils of disruptive behavior in
movie theaters: talking, texting, too-exuberant handjobs, loud snack-eating. But
I would argue that disruptive behavior during television is worse, except that
it affects a smaller number of people.

First, television is less naturally immersive than film,
because you're not in a darkened room staring at a ginormous screen with a
hundred other people who are hopefully also rapt. Second, because television is
still struggling with the perception that it's somehow less ambitious than
movies. (There have been dozens of articles in the past five years saying some
variation of "television is no longer dumber than movies," and the
fact that this is even a headline means we still have to keep pushing.) And
finally, television depends on your long-term investment in a set of characters
and their world, and that immersion is a fragile thing.

So the next time you're watching television with your
friends, and they ask you to stop distracting them? Please do as you're told.
The entire television audience, everywhere, thanks you.